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Contents
3 Haiti
4 Beirut
5 Joplin
6 Headlines 1
7 News Flow
8 West Point
9 Rain Shadow Review
10 Campaign 2012
11 European Union
12 Intervention
13 Song of the News
Part Two: Questions
1 The Art of the Interview
2 Philip Roth
3 Taha Muhammad Ali
4 Mark Morris
5 Headlines 2
6 Richard Avedon
7 Gore Vidal
8 Suzanne Farrell: September 10, 2001
9 Brice Marden
10 Neanderthal
11 Museum of Modern Art
12 Night
13 Interview
Part Three: The News from Home
1 Letters to the Editor
2 Voice
3 The Influence of Anxiety
4 Sam Brown
5 Side Effects
6 Television: An Argument
7 Headlines 3
8 Memory
9 Succession
10 The News inside His Head
11 Channel One: Guide
12 Cortona
13 Forecast
Part Four: The News at Midnight
1 Theater of War
2 Honor Roll
3 History
4 Obituary
5 Poetry and Prose
6 Haiti: Kacite
Foreword
Jeffrey Brown in this book apprehends some specific realities: the news as a medium and the news that is the medium’s object. Brown’s poetry examines that material in a new way, giving it a fresh, urgent form. I mean form as the term applies to sports or dance: an effective, useful organizing of energy. The News is more than a venture into art by someone prominent in another field. In these poems, an unconventional subject for poetry is dealt with from within, by a real poet.
“To see beyond the camera,” says Brown about his purpose. The phrase works in two directions. Looking outward, these poems strive to see beyond the camera’s instrumental vision of what is before it, the stuff of the daily news: disasters and elections, celebrations and wars, famous artists and notorious criminals. Looking inward, Brown offers a vision from the other side of the camera: the feelings, understandings, and bewilderments of the makers who work behind the instrument, directing and controlling its gaze.
Jeffrey Brown respects his profession. His belief in the value of news reporting, along with his ways of questioning the processes, gives a spine of purpose to The News. Jaded skepticism would be trivial, and preening would be even worse. Pride in the work, along with candid fatigue and misgivings, animates the poet’s quest to get what the news medium and its devices can see externally and what it can know internally.
Ultimately, this subject matter is as mysterious as culture itself. More immediately, it has immeasurable importance in the political realm, the world of power. Brown treats that world, its eminences and accomplishments, its thugs and abominations, with the passionate, lyrical understatement of a onetime classics major.
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